1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for converting a formula included in a source code of a computer program so that a user can easily understand the function of the formula.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recent economic activities have been performed mainly by companies. To know the state of a company, its financial information is an important key. In public companies, it is mandatory by laws to make their financial information public. With the publicized financial information, the state of the companies can be known. Therefore, it is desired to make detailed financial information public.
One method of making financial information public by using information technology, such as the Internet, is eXtensible-Business-Reporting-Language (XBRL), which is based on eXtensible-Markup-Language (XML) and has attracted attention. The XBRL is a language for use in electronically describing, for example, a report regarding financial information, such as an income statement or balance sheet.
Application programs for managing financial information are generally used. In such application programs, for example, numerical values or the like of several items are input to a computer, and then results from computation of the input numerical values are output. However, to examine what kind of computation or process was used inside the computer for outputting the results, the contents of the application program have to be referred to.
In general, to help understand a source code described in a program language, a comment is included in the source code. The comment has a description about the process of the program. By extracting the comment included in the source code, the description about the process of the program can be obtained.
Thus, by extracting the comment included in the source code, specifications of the program can be created. Therefore, as more comments are included in the source code, specifications that are more easily understandable can be created for users.
In one conventional technology, a comment including a comment keyword can be inserted into a portion lacking in comments in a source code. The comment is extracted from the source code to create specifications (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-169692).
In another conventional technology, program specifications and other documents can be created and, furthermore, when a change occurs in the program, the reason for the change of the program, system configuration, or information about changes in a source program due to the changed portion of the program are used to create program specification after the change (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-366354).
However, in the conventional technologies described above, the source code is described in XBRL, which is a special program language. Therefore, a specialist conversant with financial information but not with the program language cannot understand a specific financial state from the description of the source code. As result, the financial information is practically not disclosed, and the actual management state of the company disadvantageously remains not transparent.
Furthermore, even if a specialist conversant with financial information has knowledge about XBRL to some degree, the amount of description of the source code is enormous. Therefore, it will require enormous efforts to understand specific financial state from such an enormous amount of source code, thereby making it difficult to understand the financial state.